Koro language (Vanuatu)

This article is about the Koro language of Vanuatu. For other uses, see Koro language (disambiguation).

Koro
Pronunciation	[kʊrʊ]
Native to	Vanuatu
Region	Gaua
Native speakers	250 (2012)
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Oceanic Southern Oceanic North-Central Vanuatu North Vanuatu Torres-Banks Koro
Language codes
ISO 639-3	krf
Glottolog	koro1318
ELP	Koro (Vanuatu)
Koro is classified as Definitely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger.

Koro is an Oceanic language spoken on Gaua island in Vanuatu. Its 280 speakers live in the village of Koro, on the south coast of Gaua.

Koro is a distinct language from its immediate neighbours, Dorig (300 sp.) and Olrat (4 sp.).

Name

The name Koro, spelled natively as Kōrō [kʊrʊ], is an endonym referring to the village.

Phonology

Koro has eight phonemic vowels. These include seven monophthongs /i ɪ ɛ a ɔ ʊ u/ and one diphthong /ɛ͡a/.

	Front	Back
Near-close	i ⟨i⟩	u ⟨u⟩
Close-mid	ɪ ⟨ē⟩	ʊ ⟨ō⟩
Open-mid	ɛ ⟨e⟩	ɔ ⟨o⟩
Open	a ⟨a⟩

The diphthong [ɛ͡a] is spelled as ⟨ä⟩.

Grammar

The system of personal pronouns in Koro contrasts clusivity, and distinguishes four numbers (singular, dual, trial, plural).

Spatial reference in Koro is based on a system of geocentric (absolute) directionals, which is typical of Oceanic languages.

Notes and references

Bibliography

• François, Alexandre (2005), "Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), Oceanic Linguistics, 44 (2): 443–504, doi:10.1353/ol.2005.0034, S2CID 131668754
• —— (2011), "Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence" (PDF), Journal of Historical Linguistics, 1 (2): 175–246, doi:10.1075/jhl.1.2.03fra, hdl:1885/29283.
• —— (2012), "The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages" (PDF), International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2012 (214): 85–110, doi:10.1515/ijsl-2012-0022, S2CID 145208588
• —— (2015). "The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages" (PDF). In Alexandre François; Sébastien Lacrampe; Michael Franjieh; Stefan Schnell (eds.). The languages of Vanuatu: Unity and diversity. Studies in the Languages of Island Melanesia. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics. pp. 137–195. hdl:1885/14819. ISBN 978-1-922185-23-5.
• —— (2016), "The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu" (PDF), in Pozdniakov, Konstantin (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : tendances actuelles, Faits de Langues, vol. 47, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 25–60
• —— (2021). "In love with an eel man". Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS. Retrieved 22 Feb 2022.

External links

• Linguistic map of north Vanuatu, showing range of Koro on Gaua.
• Audio recordings in the Koro language, in open access, by A. François (Pangloss Collection).